Rome [ENA] Technological know-how co-exists with poverty and misery. And the fact that development solutions are in pervasive use elsewhere, does not mean that they will be deployed at scale in the least developed countries. The limitation is that it hasn’t yet been imagined how to address the less-glamorous and more everyday organizational, entrepreneurial, financial, and business development issues associated

with getting these solutions into the hands of tens, if not hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets. Paradoxically, the same scientific progress that generates new technological solutions may worsen the deployment challenge.
The Global Solutions Summit (GSS) will convene at the United Nations in New York City on June 4, 2018. It will precede and complement the Third Annual UN STI Forum supported by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development which will convene at the UN on June 5-6, 2018. The theme of this year’s Summit is “From Lab to the Last Mile: Technology Deployment Business Models for the SDGs.”

GSS 2018 is the third in a series beginning with the Inaugural Summit at the US State Department in April 2014 and a Second Summit at the Clinton Presidential Library in December 2016. To date, the global development community has devoted substantial time, attention, and resources to developing innovative solutions. These programs have generated enormous benefits and, as a have demonstrated, effective and affordable solutions for many of the most persistent development problems: off-grid, renewable energy, potable water, community health clinics, solar powered irrigation pumps, off-grid food storage, refrigeration, and processing, etc.

These new solutions should make it even more reasonably priced and easier, in principle, to hit the Sustainable Development Goals targets, specifically in the least developed countries (LDCs) where enormous progress should be possible simply by learning how to implement proven solutions that are already in widespread use in other countries.
GSS2018 is based on the premise that “It takes more creativity and innovation to market a new invention than it did to invent it in the first place." The challenge now becomes figuring out how to scale-up the deployment of these distributed, inexpensive facilities so that they reach tens of millions of people in a relatively short period of time.

Although the capital cost of these new technologies may be much lower compared to older technologies, the community empowerment, organizational, financial, capacity building and entrepreneurial challenge of deploying, financing, managing, and maintaining thousands of water purification kiosks or microgrids in thousands of communities is considerably more complex.The current deployment ecosystem, in other words, is like a pipeline in which all the essential parts and components are present in one form or another. But instead of having all the parts and components connected appropriately to each other, there is a series of broken circuits where essential connections are missing.